Remote administration of user devices is useful to allow central control over the operation and use of user devices.
Remote administration can be used to control applications on user devices at an operating system level, by restricting access to operating system features and Application Program Interfaces (APIs). For example, Blackberry® Enterprise Server includes “custom application control policies” which are pushed to user devices and then enforced by the operating system. Custom application control policies only have effect on Java applications and are pre-defined in Blackberry® Enterprise Server, they cannot be defined by an application author. As of Nov. 23, 2012, 26 such application policy rules are defined. Examples include whether internal or external network connections are allowed, whether access to specific APIs is allowed (such as the Email API, the Phone API, etc.) and definition of specific domain names that an application can establish a connection to.